September 30, 2006

General Motors Corp., Toyota Motor Corp. and Ford Motor Co., the world's three largest automakers, are discovering that a housing slump can do what record fuel prices couldn't: cripple demand for pickup trucks.

From 1995-2005, sales of full-size pickups surged 46 percent as home builders bought them for work-related projects and consumers followed suit.

But sales are down 14 percent this year, hurt by a housing slowdown that caused existing-home prices to drop for the first time in 11 years last month.

Like I have been saying, we are only now BEGINNING to see the bubble pop and the ripples that will follow across the economy. Here, just from the first signs of a slowdown we see pickup truck sales way off. There are layoffs in the mortgage industry, and certainly realtors are cutting back. What sectors will be affected as sales slow further and prices drop? Home Depot comes to mind...

Remember what happened to the stock market? Like stocks, housing has a certain value that you can calculate. Housing prices MUST revert to the mean, and the mean is less than half of current prices. So I think that there is a lot more pain to come.

Posted by Dave Johnson at September 30, 2006 4:53 PM

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